My First Impression [Bugs and Issues]

Dear Uber Entertainment,

At first, thank you for this lovely concept of a game. After the first gameplay trailer I knew I just had to have it, regardless if there would be a beta or not. After anxiously waiting for the beta yesterday I have been playing for 3 hours straight (I really had to crash after that, work and such) and I really enjoy all of the classes (whereas my preference currently goes to my custom Assassin).

Anyway, enough sweet talk, let's get down to business. As a Game Developer (also very known with the UE3 engine) I am fully aware this is a beta and may not be considered final gameplay. As this is a beta you guys expect feedback, which I am going to provide you. Note that some of this feedback may even be targeted at the programmers.

Obviously infamous but the serverlist is quite annoying due to the fact the "Open" slots do not represent the actual numbers (even negative numbers), besides that my brothers PC hangs 9/10 times when pressing the Join-button (he has to manually type disconnect in the console). Other than that the check for "full" happens after a game has been loaded, which is quite annoying. This is because the "AtCapacity" function found in GameInfo is called during event Login, rather than event PreLogin, this could spare A LOT of frustration.

While in a lobby, it's quite annoying there is no actual chat function (only microphone, not in-game). You can use the console (using the say command) for the time being, but it's just not that conventient. Other than that the server lobby hangs from time to time, saying: "The game starts in 0 seconds...", but nothing happens. Annoyance that comes with this is that the host, the person who made the listen server doesn't have any control over it! You can't force start the server, kick people, or even change next map/gametype/team, which should IMO be base functionality of a lobby. The result of this is that I can't play this game with my brother over LAN (as he can't join the other team and the server therefor can't start, thus missing the COOP aspect).

For the actual gameplay, I have no complaints, it's extremely fun. There are still some visual glitches (mostly turret-fire seen through windows cause black boxes to be shown). Lag can be very bad (but this is due to Epic's standard movement-replication), so you might want to consider adding a simple timenudging technique alongside, in order to compensate heavy(!!!) lag that may occur. And a "Are you sure you wish to purchase this Tag" would be appreciated.

I'm looking forward towards the actual release in 2011 and all of the new content that may come, keep it up Uber Entertainment.

Yours sincerely,
Lennard Fonteijn

PS. I would love to chat to/discuss with some programmers of MNC about techniques used in the game, like: two sketalmeshes syncing animations (grap), the cool "vaporizing" effect when you die, the choice for sticking with UIScenes when UE3 has Scaleform integration and many other intersting topics Just PM me!

The skeletal mesh syncing is actually as simple as it looks, not really any magic there.

I'll let Ben comment on the vaporize effect but it's just a shader.

We are using the UIScenes because scaleform was really expensive. It didn't become free until after we'd already built too much stuff. We will not be building on UIScenes in the future.

Thanks for your replies! I'll try to get some discussion going on. I am asking these question because I would like to see how other developers would tackle such "problems" and out of interest in the "process behind it all".

So there is no magic involved like spawning a "overlay mesh" (basically a two models of the character on top of eachother) in order to get the vaporizing effect, it's just 1 model + 1 material? That's pretty neat.

As for the animation, because there are so many character-2-character interactions, I figured you guys would have made some bad-*** code to be sure animations remain in sync other than just starting each animation right after eachother and hope for the best...

I also would like to say the ragdolls and their weight are just perfect, I haven't been able to get such nice ragdolls out of UE3 yet myself and I figure it took quite some time to get them right.

As you guys announced an editor will be released, does that mean you guys will also include documentation for making our own gametypes (you don't have to release any code for that!)? Will the game become mod friendly other than just levels?

Speaking of the code, is it programmed with extension in mind, like:
- Easily adding more teams and characters
- Skill logic split from PlayerControllers/Pawns
- etc.

Or did you code towards the core gameplay, where extension would take some more time than when you would have set it up more dynamically? My preference usually goes to the more dynamic approach, for the record.

Did you guys change anything significant in the UE3 engine itself, other than just UnrealScript code, as I suppose the cell-shading is a Post-Process Effect in combination with cartoony textures.

Other than all this talk, I have a few crashdumps made by the game after it crashed (usually occurs after a round ends or right after it starts). If you guys are interested in debugging these, I would be more than happy to upload them somewhere.

Thanks for your time and such an awesome game!

Speaking of the UE3 engine: will the various config (like BaseEngine.ini, etc.) files be editable in the final version? One thing I've noticed is that none of the values I change will "take" when I load up the game - even ResX and ResY (for some reason my game loads up at 1280x800 every time despite my screen's native res being 1680x1050).

Will this game have multi-monitor support for technologies like ATI Eyefinity and Nvidia Surround? I haven't loaded it up on my main rig yet and I'm hoping it isn't stretched to hell...

Anyway, hope this isn't considered a hi-jack; I just saw some useful discussion going on and thought I'd ask.

You should actually leave all files in the Engine directory be and only modify INI files that start with the name "Hostile". "Base" ini's are used as a base for the "Default" ini's found in the HostileGame directory, of that the game generates "Hostile" ini's. The ones found in My Document/My Games/UnrealEngine3 are leading, other "Hostile" ini's can be found in the Steam directory.

If you want a more or less permanent configuration (even after you deleted the "Hostile" ini's) the place to be are the "Default" ini's.

Hope that solves/clears up your problem.

Hmm, I only tried the Base ini's after changing the Hostile ini's didn't work. I can't recall if I touched the Default ini's but I'll give it a try and report back. Thanks!

It's actually built into the shader used on all the characters if I'm not mistaken. No overlay needed.

There is a lot of code to get them synched but ultimately there is nothing magical.

It took a bit of tweaking but again no magic sauce.

The short answer is I don't know yet.

Skills are setup to be easily added, moved around etc. Adding more teams is a lot of work though.

For the most part we are using standard unreal structure.

We made no mods to the renderer at all. There isn't actually any cell shading.

Crashdumps get auto uploaded by steam.

Taken from an other topic, I'm very interested in what was causing the crash, no really.

It was caused by some printf logging error.